Coachability — or Help is Never Owed
This week, I turned two people away. Not because I had the luxury. Because I had to.
I wanted the work. But not enough to betray the threshold.
They weren’t ready. One needed a therapist. The other needed someone to play along.
I do neither.
I said, simply: this isn’t for us.
And that should’ve been the end of it. But hours later, I was still chewing on the question: what makes someone coachable?
I don’t mean compliant. I don’t mean clever. I don’t mean emotionally literate, trauma-literate, algorithmically-literate. I mean someone who lets the work land. Someone who lets it move them without rehearsing their response. Someone who doesn’t just come to be seen, but to see.
Coachability isn’t a checklist. It’s an orientation. It’s the way you walk into a house and take your own shoes off before being asked. It’s how you don’t ask for permission to change.
It’s not about how much you want to grow. Wanting to grow is cheap. Anyone can want that. Coachability is how you treat discomfort. Do you fidget until it goes away? Or do you stay — stay long enough to hear what it came to say?
You can’t teach coachability. But you can spot it. Coachability shows up in posture. In the pause before the defence. In the ones who arrive already mid-sentence.
And the coach? The coach doesn’t create their growth. Sometimes the coach gets it wrong. Sometimes they leave you colder than they found you. That’s the risk. The coach walks in like a weather pattern, unpredictable and true. They mirror, distort, reflect, amplify — but never perform. The work is not a service. It’s a threshold.
So here’s a rule I follow: just because someone can pay doesn’t mean I should open the door. I’m not running a theme park. I don’t care if they’ve got a Substack or a trauma timeline. I don’t care if they cry. I care if they show up to be changed.
A good client is not a sponge. They are a flint. They come to spark. To scrape something true against the dark.
And if you’re reading this wondering whether you’re coachable — you’re already asking the wrong question. The better question is:
Would you still do the work if no one saw it? If you never got better? If the only result was remembering, for a fleeting hour, that you are alive?
That’s coachability.
Are you looking for a takeaway? Maybe that’s the most coachable thing of all — to stop looking. Not every knock means readiness. Not every readiness deserves entry. And help — real help — is never owed.